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Unfortunate Son

Will Mount Pleasant embrace a penitent Zack Reed?

By Lisa Rab 

Lavender tie, pin-striped suit, freshly manicured hair — Councilman Zack Reed arrives for lunch at Ocean Wave on Kinsman Road with every detail in place.

This is Sober Zack Reed, the immaculate politician who sips water with lime and speaks passionately about fixing his broken city.

As he launches into his favorite topic — turning Kinsman into the new Harlem, a tourist spot for African Americans — he seems a long way from the drunken playboy who shows up in grainy Channel 19 videos and passes out in his BMW.

This Reed spent $50,000 on off-duty police officers to patrol Mount Pleasant and had bricks thrown into his car windows for publicly blasting drug dealers. His local community organization installed sidewalk surveillance cameras to scare thugs from the street corners. And he raised hell to make sure black workers were hired to build the new A.J. Rickoff elementary school.

Over lunch, he speaks of incentives to lure businesses to the area, noting the redesigned storefront for Henry's Cleaners at 116th, the new foot doctor across the street, and fresh bricks on the sidewalk that are meant to conjure images of African heritage.

"We are going to bring back the same neighborhood that I had growing up," he says.

You want to believe him. In this city, in this part of town, even the smallest steps forward are cause for celebration. That's immediately evident as soon as you step outside.

Boarded windows. Beggars camped out in doorways. Security gates pulled over entire half-blocks of stores, as if prison bars contain the ghosts of former prosperity. This is the other Kinsman Road, the one you see if you're not Zack Reed.

The side streets are worse, offering tours of sagging balconies, peeling paint, and plywood windows that speak of abandonment.

There are no Wal-Marts here, no Starbucks or Giant Eagles. Just a Save-a-Lot and an abundance of dollar stores, payday lenders, barbershops, and churches. Beverage stores have replaced the corner mom-and-pop baker or butcher. The occasional Chinese or barbecue restaurant offers a forlorn sign of neon life in a funeral march of brown and gray.

This is the neighborhood where last April, Damon Wells defended his home from a pair of teenage robbers by killing one who'd brandished a gun on his front porch. It's also the neighborhood that nurtured some of the teens accused of beating lawyer Kevin McDermott when he was out for a stroll in nearby Shaker Heights.

"If you look up and down this street here, it's like Siberia," one Kinsman shop owner says. "There's no money in the community. There's no jobs. There's no industry."

The shopkeep refuses to provide his name, lest he get less cooperation from the city "by being real about the problem." But his gray-flecked beard and worry lines attest to decades of struggling to do business on Kinsman, where business isn't good. His windows have been broken; bars now cover them. Even when his store is open, he keeps his front door locked.

In his eyes, Councilman Reed is part of the problem, just another pretty politician practicing a game of three-card monte.

"I'm tired of him," says the shopkeep. "It's like the shell game. He shows you things, and then you look at it — it's not there."

Those off-duty cops Reed hired only show up during the day, the man says. And every time he runs to the convenience store, there's still someone trying to sell him weed. He compares the Afrocentric bricks and fancy storefronts on 116th Street to the Euclid Corridor project — "a joke."

"The leadership is not doing anything to keep the community from drowning."

Decades ago, he remembers serving customers who were auto workers, doctors, and judges — professional men who could afford gifts for wives and girlfriends. They've all moved out, lost their jobs, or don't feel safe shopping here anymore. When he scans the street, he can almost understand why so many people here prefer to invest their money in the next high. "When you sober up, it ain't too pleasant what you're looking at."

Walking out of jail, smiling as he ducked microphones jammed in his face — anyone watching Zack Reed that day in 2006 likely saw him as just another Cleveland politician. We're accustomed to seeing our public servants transformed into criminals on the evening news.

There is, of course, a big difference between driving drunk and pirating the public treasury. Still, in the land of low expectations, Reed was doing his best to meet them.

His path to prominence follows in the same tradition of patronage and favors that bred so many of his colleagues. It began in the '70s, when Councilman Bill Franklin asked Reed to pass out political fliers on his paper route. After college, he worked on Lee Fisher's state Senate campaign. Fisher repaid him with a summer job cleaning highway rest stops at ODOT.

His rise would continue through a string of low-level patronage appointments. Congressman Louis Stokes first caught a glimpse of Reed when the future councilman was teaching teenagers to beautify parks. "He was conscientious, he was bright, and he was a definite leader," Stokes says.

It wasn't long before Reed was rubbing shoulders with the power brokers of Cuyahoga County, like commissioners Tim Hagan and Jimmy Dimora, former Cleveland Mayor Mike White, and former Brook Park Mayor Tom Coyne. But he wouldn't find his role model until he took a job running a youth apprenticeship program for rebuilding public housing in San Francisco. That's where he met Mayor Willie Brown.

As speaker, Brown had ruled the California State Assembly with near-mythical power. He was an equally outsized personality while serving as San Francisco's first and only black mayor, famous for his Italian suits, extravagant hats, and hitting the nightclubs and the women with equal vigor. Brown's motto: "You gotta look the part."

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